Summer Vege Bag - Week 1

Click on any vegetable that has a link to see previous posts with recipes and cooking tips. You can also browse and filter the whole vege bag archive by vegetable here.

Kia ora!

Welcome to the kaupapa new Ōtaki Vege Bag members! We still have a little space for more members, so please let your mates know - it’s really the best form of “advertising” for us!

We have a small amount of a native Puha this week, from our friends at Kai Ora in Te Horo - this is quite a special one, so a bit more about that below.

We’ve also got more avocados from local growers Sharon & Matt this week, along with a couple of bits from Live2Give Organics. For those who haven’t been around, Crooked Vege has worked closely Live2Give since we started a nearly 3 years ago. They’re a larger scale organic vegetable farm, and are really pushing the edges of sustainable production in larger-scale/tractor based systems, more than anyone else we know in Aotearoa. We supply their online shop, and their own vege box scheme. We grow salad, radishes, cucumbers, zucchini (etc etc), which they collect from our chiller and pack into their boxes en-route to their Wellington customers. While they collect, they also deliver a few things for Ōtaki Vege Bags that we aren’t able to produce here.

This week we have:

1. Salad mix (Ahoaho māra kai)

2. Cucumbers (Ahoaho māra kai)

3. Radishes (Ahoaho māra kai)

4. Zucchini (Crooked Vege Ōtaki) and/or Leeks (Kai Ora)

5. Microgreens (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)

6. Celery (Live2Give Organics), Puha or Spinach (Kai Ora)

7. Spring Onions (Live2Give Organics)

8. Avocados (Sharon & Matt)

Vege highlights + suggested uses:

Puha

This is quite a special crop, grown by our friends at Kai Ora, in Te Horo.
What most of us think of as Puha arrived in Aotearoa with early Scottish settlers. However, Kai Ora grow the variety that was already here when tangata whenua arrived. It has a stronger taste, heartier texture (somewhere between spinach and silverbeet, perhaps) and is a little more bitter. You can use it much the same - boil up, or saute it with a little garlic and chilli.